Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
say - we can ultimately shut out the information, knowledge,
sights or sounds thrown our way. From the mid-1970s, the so-called
'Birmingham School' of media and cultural studies questioned this
idea. Based in England, critics like Stuart Hall showed that audiencing
is not only part of a continuous process of shaping people's identi-
ties. They also showed that even 'innocent' or seemingly 'non-serious'
acts of communication, such as television soap operas, can serve to
reproduce (or occasionally challenge) conventional ideas about very
important subjects, such as sexuality, gender roles, terrorism, national
identity or environmental change. The increasing prominence, since
the turn of the twentieth century, of state education and the mass
media in many countries means that, today, the process of audiencing
can 'capture' millions of people at a time. In other cases, audiences
are far smaller and more exclusive - especially when they're 'counter-
cultural' in their shared beliefs, political values, interests or practices.
In any given case, there's no foolproof way of gauging how 'successful'
the audiencing process is. Though sensitive to the way powerful insti-
tutions can shape audience beliefs and values, Stuart Hall (in several
1980s publications) nonetheless insisted that the 'encoding' of mean-
ing by various epistemic communities (e.g. documentary film-makers)
does not always translate in the ways these communities intend when
meaning is 'decoded' by their target audiences in practice. This is most
obvious when decoding occurs outside the country where meaning is
encoded - as revealed in Liebes and Katz's (1990)
The export of meaning
,
which examined how non-American audiences interpreted the hit soap
opera
Dallas
. An excellent introduction to 'audiencing' is the recent
Handbook of media audiences
by Virginia Nightingale (2011).
As the influential philosopher-cum-historian Michel Foucault rightly
insisted, it would be wrong to think that the process of subject-formation
is planned or orchestrated by any one actor, group or agency - even one as
powerful as the national state or an organised religion like Catholicism. The
sociologist Nikolas Rose put it like this in his book
Inventing ourselves
:
Subjectification
designate[s] all those heterogenous processes and practices
by means of which human beings come to relate to themselves and others
as subjects of a certain type
...
a complex
of apparatuses, practices, machinations and assemblages within which human
beings are fabricated
...
[It is to be]
...
understood as
...
....
(Rose, 1998: 25, 18)
This argument encourages us to see our identities, values, habits and beliefs
as 'emergent' products of a differentiated and changeable environment in
